Portrait of Susannah Earle wearing a silk dress with lace collar and blue ribbons. Oil on canvas in the fine original carved and giltwood frame. Inscribed upper left ''Mrs Earle''. Susannah Earle of Eastcourt House, Wiltshire (died 1796/1797) was the daughter of Alice White nee Hicks (born 1693) and therefore a first cousin of Sir Howe Hicks. She was born at Witcombe, Gloucestershire, and later was instrumental in introducing her Hicks cousins to the Beach family of Wiltshire paving the way for the creation of the Hicks Beach dynasty.Her husband, William Rawlinson Earle (7 April 1702 - 10 August 1774), of Eastcourt House, Crudwell, near Malmesbury, Wiltshire, was a British politician who sat in the House of Commons for 40 years between 1727 and 1768.He was the eldest son of Giles Earle and his wife Elizabeth Rawlinson, daughter of Sir William Rawlinson of Hendon House, Middlesex and widow of John Lowther of Lowther, Westmorland. He married, with �20,000, the heiress Susannah White, daughter of William White of Somerford, Wiltshire on 4 January 1731.HENRY PICKERING (1720-circa 1775) was a fashionable and gifted portrait artist working in the style of the great Thomas Hudson. Hudson and Pickering were both known to use the famous drapery painter Joseph van Aken. He travelled to Italy to learn from the old masters and seems to have returned to England, and London, by 1740. By the 1750s he seems to have worked as an itinerant portrait painter travelling around the country, eventually settling in Manchester in 1759.SIZE: 37 x 32 inches including the frame.PROVENANCE: By descent. LITERATURE ''A Cotswold Family: Hicks and Hicks Beach'' published in 1909 by Mrs William Hicks Beach; it traces the Gloucestershire roots of the Hicks family back to the 14th century. ( From p.271 ''She {Susannah} had twinkling pearl earrings and fashionable lace, and constantly reminded Witcombe, we may be sure, that Gloucestershire was not the universe'')...